Wars Never End

The frightening acrid stench of mustard gas has almost dissipated from Granddad’s foggy mind. He is one of the few old men who remain of those who struggled stupidly for King and Country through the boot-sucking mud of the Great War. Now that he’s past one hundred years, it is difficult to discern if those images are real or only in his mind; images of gray-clad Huns with gas masked-faces like one-eyed monsters, bright bayonets held high coming for him through the mustard mists in France; or those loud sudden sounds that make him jump, indiscriminate heavy shells tearing the very sacred earth where yesterday evening he buried his closest friend - a friend of too few short years - buried there without time for tears before the next raid across no man’s land. Now he sits and rocks, waiting for the lieutenant’s last shrieking whistle that will end his war.

I ask my father why he had to make that tragic journey back to Holland, to march in his new blue blazer with ribbons proud, through the streets again where once he fought from door to door beating back the enemy who had torn Europe asunder yet one more time. Even though his tired medicated heart had to strain to move his proud marching feet in tune to the same wailing pipes that led him ashore, dodging bullets from invisible machine guns and pistols, he had to hear again the heroic cries of man killing man as young Canadian men spilled blood, too often their own, bravely charged again up foreign shores. Did he believe that this body-tiring trip would erase those images or did he hope to reinforce the reason for his being? I ask him, knowing my own answers . . .

The sticky smell of fast-rotting human flesh of spilled guts exposed to stifling jungle heat, the muddy thump of mortars creeping nearer and nearer to our hidden listening post where Jim and I wait for Charlie, our faces painted green and black like obscene players on a comic stage directed by remote puppeteers in a struggle that grows more senseless day by day. Is it the recurring effect of the drugs we tried in vain attempts to quell the mental nausea? I replay those scenes in my mind at night, causing me to scream and soak in sweat. Will I ever forget those night horrors?

And now my son tells me again and again, as if he where an old man, like Granddad, who cannot remember that he has already repeated and repeated the guilty story of bombing and strafing fleeing Iraqis as they retreated carrying Kuwaiti loot across the oil-fired sands. And yet I know he feels some close-knit comradery with other pilots who roared into the dangerous dark Arabian nights filled with SAMs and exploding AA shells, images that will for many more years haunt the young men like him ...

How far have we come since Granddad proudly marched off to serve King and Country in the Great War? The necessity of stopping the Axis powers has been long glorified in print and on screen, with touches of doubt and realism only creeping in after we rejected the politicians’ reasons for Vietnam. We now call our young warriors “Peacekeepers” and send them off to protect civilians from tyrants and despots who would harm the helpless. Will there ever be an end to the killing?

But for those who have served, a war does not end by treaty or annihilation of the enemy. It is as vivid as yesterday in the mind of the victor or the vanquished. War does not end until the last soldier dies.

Bill Walton